Meta

Watermills with Horizontal Wheels

Watermills with Horizontal Wheels is another document I got from the CD3WD set, but it was written to preserve history, not to be a how to. Fortunately the quality of information and how it is presented allows it to be used to construct watermills.

The great thing about water as stationary power is that is consistent – find a year round creek, set up a wheel, and you have power 24 hours a day.

some times of the year you may have more or less power, but you have a power source you can count on. While the potential energy ot the water is used by the wheel, the water is not changed so you really don’t lose anything – this makes water wheels aa very sustainable energy source.

It is why every suitable hydroelectric site in this country has a dam across it with a electric generator installed. Its cheap and safe electricity.

Now water does not have to power generators, and many creeks that are not suitable to power generators can easily power water mills for mechanical energy.

I include this passage from wikipedia to explain why this post is not just Watermills, and why it includes the Horizontal Aspect:

One major way to classify watermills is by wheel orientation (vertical or horizontal), one powered by a vertical waterwheel through a gearmechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and pitchback (backshot or reverse shot) waterwheel mills. Another way to classify water mills is by an essential trait about their location: tide mills use the movement of the tide; ship mills are water mills onboard (and constituting) a ship.